From Corpus to Classroom: Teaching Semi-technical Business English Vocabulary

Abstract

Semi-technical vocabulary has been considered a challenging and neglected area of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) instruction. This paper employs AntConc to extract a keyword list of a self-compiled business English textbook corpus (BETC). Through manual identification from corpus keywords, we focus on semi-technical vocabulary, addressing the fundamental question of “how to identify”. We also draw upon pedagogical materials from the academic sub-corpora within the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) to design a corpus-based language pedagogy (CBLP) lesson. This lesson serves as a model for instructing the multifaceted meanings and diverse patterns of the semi-technical word “default” across various disciplines and contexts, addressing the question of “how to teach”. Our research leverages the rich resources provided by pedagogical corpora, offering in-depth analysis, including collocation, colligation, semantic preference, and semantic prosody, as effective teaching aids. In doing so, it promotes interdisciplinary, comparative, and exploratory teaching and learning of semi-technical business English vocabulary. By bridging the gap between corpus analysis and classroom instruction, it provides innovative strategies for educators in the field of business English, and by implication, in various ESP disciplines.